Challenges and discipline (or lack of)

My mother gave me for Christmas (gift I received in April) a box of learning Italian CDs. It has been on the bookshelves, taunting me, every evening putting me to shame because of my lack of discipline. I did not even open the darn package. I have been wanting to take new challenges for a while, learning Italian was one of them. I want to learn Italian because learning a new language is a skill that is not only artistic, and hence it is out of my comfort zone. I get the musicality of the accent easily enough, for me it is the fun part, but I need to learn the boring stuff: the grammar, the conjugaisons, all the things that you need to know and integrate to understand it and appreciate it completely. I want to be able to understand it, enough to read it without help and to hold a conversation in Italian. But the evenings, I am tired and I don't have the energy to do it.

Which is a cheap excuse of course. I had enough energy to do acting for two hours every Wednesday, even to do some extra rehearsals with my friends. What I really lack is discipline. That said, a lot of the learning and creative process in acting is intuitive, and in it easier to find the energy to do it. Especially since it had warming up exercises before, things that helped me relax and focus on the task ahead. I am not big on learning through fun, but if there is one thing fun to learn it is acting. Learning a foreign language, on the other hand, is hard, dry and you can get easily scared. Still, I need to find the discipline to go through the dry stuff. I always regretted not being able to sustain a conversation in Italian with Liana Burgess, who could speak French fluently, with barely a hint of accent. So I better get my mind into it.